Читаем Teranesia полностью

‘That’s why Darwin invented Sunday afternoons. Listen, I did my entire degree sharing a house with six other students. It was quadraphonic fucking twenty-four hours a day. Madhusree has it easy.’ Felix stretched his legs and sat back on the couch.

‘Yeah, well I’m sorry you were stranded in a bohemian nightmare, but it’s not my role to put character-building hurdles in front of her. She’s entitled to some peace in her own apartment when she needs it.’

Felix said nothing. He glanced at the TV.

Prabir said, ‘If you’d called me at work we could have met at your place.’

Felix kept his mouth shut, refusing to prolong the argument. He reached over and ran the back of his hand along Prabir’s forearm, a gesture that seemed both conciliatory and erotic, but Prabir wasn’t willing to let the matter drop. He said, ‘Just admit that I’m not being unreasonable.’

Madhusree emerged from her room. ‘Hi Felix.’ She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then addressed Prabir. ‘I’m going out. Don’t wait up.’

‘Where are you headed?’

‘Nowhere special. I’m just meeting some friends.’

‘That sounds good.’ Prabir tried to read her clothes, but he didn’t know the codes any more. She could have been on her way to a diplomatic reception in a five-star hotel, or a demolition party, for all he could tell.

He said, ‘Have fun.’

She smiled at him, you too, then raised a hand goodbye to Felix.

When she was gone, Felix feigned interest in the TV. The Zeitgeist Channel – a redirection filter that automatically displayed whatever the greatest number of people in the same town or city were watching – was showing a bland office comedy. Prabir said, ‘Did I ever tell you that one of my foster-parents wrote a ten-thousand-word academic paper called “Second-Level Mutual Inter-Sitcom Self-Reference as a Signifier for the Sacred”?’

Felix cracked up. ‘Who published it? Social Text?’

‘How did you know that?’

In the bedroom, Felix said, ‘Any chance of a visual cortex massage?’ Prabir knelt over him and gently peeled the electrode sheet from his back. The skin beneath was slightly pale, but it wasn’t waxen like the skin beneath a cast or a bandage; the polymer let through plenty of oxygen. Felix claimed to wash the twenty-thousand-dollar device in the laundromat along with his shirts, but Prabir had never actually witnessed this.

When Felix had been born with malformed retinas, in 2006, artificial replacements were just coming into use. But there’d been no prospect then of wiring the photosensor arrays directly to his brain. Instead, circuitry in the sheet received the signals from his eyes, and the electrodes stimulated nerves in his back. From infancy, he’d learnt to interpret the sensations as images.

Prabir started kneading, cautiously. Felix said, ‘You can be a lot rougher. It’s not hypersensitive. It’s just skin.’

‘But … do you feel my hands, or do you see something?’

‘Both.’

‘Yeah? What do you see?’

‘Abstract patterns. Rows of dots, starbursts. But it’s all pretty faint and unconvincing. The whole point is to get a strong sensation that’s more compelling as touch than as imagery, so I don’t lose the original function of the nerves.’

Prabir had found software on the net that let him transform a camera’s image into something comparable to the information flowing through the sheet. The impressionistic, monochrome version of his own face that it had shown him had barely been recognisable as a face at all, but Felix could spot people from fifty metres. Experience made all the difference. An operation to connect the artificial retinas directly to his brain had been available for about five years, but he would have found it as hard to adjust to the new way of seeing as Prabir would have found adjusting to the sheet.

Prabir’s hands began to stray. After a while, Felix rolled on to his back and pulled Prabir down on top of him. As they kissed, Prabir felt a warmth like liquid fire spreading through his veins, and a growing tightness in his chest, as if he’d been robbed of his breath by the sight of something astonishing. This was what he wanted, more than sex itself. He had no word for it: it was far too physical to be mere tenderness, far too tender to be mere desire.

He said, ‘You know what I like most about being with you?’

‘No.’